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+100 Resource pentru Search Marketing si Blogging

laurentiu vlad — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:31:18 +0000

Resource pentru Search Marketing si Blogging

Creating Optimized Content

seosource — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 17:36:39 +0000

One of the most important factors in obtaining high rankings in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) is your content and how it implements the keywords your SE campaign is targeting. These are the top elements in having a well written landing page are, in no specific order:

· Keyword Density

· Readability

· Keyword Prominence

· Length

The first two are equally important. Keyword Prominence and length is less important.

If you have not researched your keywords, stop here and do so. Keyword research needs a great deal of attention. I will be writing again to talk about this subject specifically.

KeyWord Density is the most important when it comes to a raw search engine crawl. Calculating Keyword density works something like this:

1. Find the total number of iterations of your keyword phrase in your document. Only include the text between the <body> tags, this includes the headings. Let’s say your keyword phrase is, "Real Estate Michigan." The whole term counts as one, which means the iteration of each individual word is worth ~.3. For example, "Take a look at our Lake Michigan Property," has ~.3 keywords when searching for the phrase, "Real Estate Michigan." Also be sure to only count the number of keywords for your specific phrase. You can only calculate Keyword density for one phrase at a time.

2. Take the number of keywords in your content and divide by the total number of words on your page. So you should do some type of calculation like this:

Ex. 5.3 keywords / 285 words = 10% Keyword Density.

So what is the optimal keyword density? That seems to vary widely. These are the recommendations for Google and the websites I find them at:

Keyword Density: SEO Considerations by Wayne Hubert – 2%

Mike's Marketing Tools – 2%-8%

Pefect Keyword Density by Ahmed El-Naggar – 10%

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/16292.htm - 1%-7%

Google Ranking Factors – 5%-20%

After looking through the organic results, most of the #1 sites on Google hover between 2-3%, and this is what I recommend sticking to.

Readability is just as important for two reasons: you want to make content your user can read easily, and you really don’t want the search engines to pick up the site as spam. So let’s say a site is optimized for "Lakefront Property":

Lakefront property Lakefront Property Lakefront Property by Super Duper Land Company, etc.

No one wants to read that garbage, and search engines don’t like to crawl it either. They take one look at it and throw it into the spam-keyword-spewing bin which is very far from top SERPs.

So on top of keyword density, particular attention must be put into how far apart keywords are. I wouldn’t put the same keyword in the same sentence, because it would probably sound like spam.

Keyword Prominence is how important the keyword looks on the page. The closer to the top of the page the keyword is the more important the crawler will think it is to your site. So, for example:
Our Michigan Lakefront Property is the most beautiful land…

Will be seen as more prominent, and thus more important than something like

Blah blah blah so come see our Michigan Lakefront Property.

These examples are only a sentence long and are meant to illustrate the position of the keywords as a whole in the content. Try to put as many of your keywords in towards the top of your page as you can, and fewer of the target keywords in the bottom of your content. This way Google will see that you place a lot of importance on your keyword.

Keyword Prominence is also how close your target keywords in your keyword phrase are. If the words "Michigan," "Lakefront," and "Property" are right next to each other, they will be given more weight than if they are split up.

Michigan Lakefront Property

Will have more prominence than

Michigan has absolutely beautiful property on the lakefront

The first one will be given more preference than the second. However, using the same phrase over and over again makes for a boring read, so don’t use your entire keyword phrase too often. Split up your phrase and look for ways to put different words in the phrase into your content so that it doesn’t destroy the readability without sacrificing search engine ranking.

Length varies from many sites, and is really what ties up all of these other attributes. The average length for pages is 600, which means with a 2% keyword density you should have 12 iterations of your keyword phrase. This 12 iterations is of the "Michigan lakefront property" only. I would personally only use the entire phrase about 5 times or else you might sound like a spammer to a reader. You should have 12 iterations of every keyword in the phrase, unless there’s overlap between your keyword phrases like "michigan lakefront property" and "michigan waterfront property." Therefore you would ideally want 12 each of Michigan, lakefront, waterfront, and property.

Another thing you don’t want to do is finish a beautiful write-up because and add 200 more just because it’s only 400 words long. Don’t write bad content, your visitors won’t want to read it. Aim for 600 and if you fall short or go over then try to come up with some more useful content. If you can only succeed in adding fluff, don’t bother.

A Google Sitemaps Resource

seosource — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 19:04:21 +0000

So I realized that I wrote a post about the numerous amount of people having problems with Google Sitemaps, but I really didn't offer any help. Hopefully this will be a good resource for those of you who are looking to get started or debug current Sitemap problems.

Getting Started With Sitemaps
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ - Excellent sitemap generator.
If you have a large site (50,000 plus pages) you probably will want to consider using the Python Script provided by Google here -
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html

The xml-sitemaps generator is extremely simple to use. Just type in your URL and it does all the work for you; well almost anyway. All you have to do then is upload the code to the root directory so that you can access it via, www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml. Then you create a Google account if you don't have one already and upload the the sitemap on the sitemaps page, http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview.

Tweaking the Code
You can leave the sitemap just as it comes out from the generator, or you could tweak the code for better performance. And when I say better performance I mean theoretically better performance as it doesn't seem to affect anything right now, and when it does I don't know how big an effect this added code will help. Anyway, this added code is probably good to use regaurdless. Okay, let's learn some XML.

If you open up your sitemap.xml file it should look something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset
xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84
http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd">

<url>
<loc>http://www.highfieldbeachclub.com/</loc>
<priority>0.5</priority>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>

Okay quick description of what some of these things are:
These are the tags you need to worry about it. Everything not inbetween the <url> tags don't worry about. They are important but they won't be changed, except maybe at a later date.
<url></url> - All the data about one page of your site goes between these two tags.
<loc></loc> - The actual location of the page. Be sure these are exactly as they appear in the address bar of your search engine when you are on the page.
<priority></priority> - This tells google how important this particular page is to you. You must rank this page with any number between 0 and 1, with 1 being the most imporant. I would recommend not setting all the pages to the same number, because even though Google doesn't pay attention to it now it might later.
<changefreq></changefreq> - This tells the GoogleBot how often your content changes. If it changes frequently it will come back more frequently. Try to set this to approximately how often your site does update. If GoogleBot ever does actually start listening to this tag(which I think it already does because of my site's which are being crawled weekly rather than every other month now) it should cut down on the bog of work the crawler has to do. If everyone sets this to hourly then the time for the crawler to come back to any site can get lengthy. The possible values of this are:

always
hourly
daily
weekly
monthly
yearly
never

<lastmod></lastmod> - This one is one that should be added to every one of your url sets, like follows:

<url>
<loc>http://www.highfieldbeachclub.com/</loc>
<priority>0.5</priority>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<lastmod>2006-07-01</lastmod>
</url>

It should be between the <url> and </url> tags. Also notice the way it was input: YYYY-MM-DD. Therefore:
June 7, 1986 should be input as 1986-06-07.
I've seen a lot of people mess this up. This is very important, once again when and if Google starts to use this feature. Make sure you update this every time you update your site.

Other Problems When Using Sitemaps
Many times people experience a plethora of problems when implementing sitemaps. Why is this? Many times it isn't even there sitemap that is the problem. Quite often there page isn't crawler friendly. A good way of checking out how crawler friendly your page is is to run it through a validator like this:
http://validator.w3.org/

Another problem could be that your site hasn't been crawled well since Googles latest update (which everyone gets mad about because they are frequent and screw up ALL the SERPs), and now Google sees your site as spam. Pay particular attention to this if your site hasn't been crawled for a couple months. In the past couple of months Google has made major changes to their algorithm in an attempt to weed out spam. Now there are a lot of things that can happen to your site, such as the sandbox, and can make your site vanish off the face of the earth. The only reason why your site might have been doing well is because Google hadn't crawled your site so it was working off an old copy of your site, and the new crawl made it look like spam to Google. So sitemaps was very successful, but now you have a "My Site Looks Like Spam" problem.

For additional help or information take a look at these sites:

http://www.jonessoda.com/ - Choice drink of this blogger, very refreshing when handling frustrating SEO problems.
http://www.fullthrottleenergy.com/ - For those sites that need a little extra work, the kind that requires you to cut into nap time.

Hope you find this helpful in establishing problems after sitemaps. If you have any sites that would be useful, leave a comment and I'll take a look.